Russell Simmons On Meditation

One Of The Most Successful Men In Music Thinks You Should Be Meditating More

Career training is usually thought of as collaborative and dynamic process: a one-on-one consultation with a pro or a full room watching a loudmouth guy with a bluetooth headset, TED-style. It’s not usually thought of as something that is done alone in a dark room, with one’s eyes closed, while chanting mantras.

But regularly meditating — in a dark room, with his eyes closed, while chanting mantras — is what entrepreneur and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons attributes his success to. In discussing his career achievements in the introduction to his new book, Success Through Stillness, Simmons declares, “Let me say without any reservation that I consider meditation to be the most effective tool you can use to build a similar success in your own life.” So we kept reading.

Had meditation been presented to us in some other context, we may not have. Like most men, we at AskMen have an aversion to anything that smells remotely new-age-y. Simmons seems to be onto this, as he has cleverly assembled his book so as to address doubts head-on. Each chapter in the first half of Success Through Stillness is dedicated to eliminating a common excuse to not meditate: I don’t have the time, I don’t have anywhere to do it, etc. And he snuffs them out using extremely persuasive studies and stats that demonstrate real physical effects that meditation can have on the brain and body.

Reading Simmons’ book, and interviewing him about it after, made us consider trying out meditation as a career-enhancement tool. We think it could prompt you to do the same. So, at the risk of coming off new-age-y and overbearing, let us give you a little nudge by highlighting some of the most compelling, study-supported meditation benefits that he presented.

Meditation puts stress in perspective

The cliche of the perpetually zen-ed, half-awake meditator has its basis: there is ample scientific support for the argument that regular meditation will make you more relaxed. By “more relaxed,” we mean less prone to start stressing over every little obstacle you encounter. Our senses of anxiety and fear are often triggered by the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for firing us into action in dangerous situations (think “fight or flight”). Simmons points out that many of us are now conditioned into overusing our amygdalas and letting ourselves get fired up over petty things — for example, having a confrontation at work or seeing our computers fall victim to unexplainable crashes. Regularly overreacting (such as responding to a crashed computer the same way we would to a crashed car) is simply no way to work. Regular meditation will stop you sweating the small stuff, as demonstrated in a Harvard Medical School-affiliated study that linked meditation to decreases in activation of the amygdala.

Meditation helps you make decisions for the right reasons

Throughout his book, Simmons refers to the state brought about by regular meditation as being “in the moment,” or “present.” In this state, the meditator successfully separates himself from the past and the future — two places that tend to be loaded with emotion and anxiety, and thus two places that you don’t want to be making professional decisions from. As Simmons phrased it in our interview with him, “You don’t work in the future or the past, so the more you focus your awareness on the present, the more effective you will be. A lot of my career has been in music. And I’ve learned that when you’re writing a song, you can't worry about who’s going to buy it in the future; you have to be in the present to feel the melody. That’s the awakened state that I’m referring to.”